Here’s What Happened When ProPublica Reporters Tried to Find Out Where a Popular Prescription Drug Was Made We wanted to know where a widely used prescription drug that treats high cholesterol was manufactured and whether the factory had quality issues. The search led to a labyrinth of company names and dat...

If your medication was made in a contaminated factory, the FDA won’t tell you.

Even ProPublica reporters hit a dead end when trying to track down where a popular prescription drug (atorvastatin, which treats high cholesterol) was made and whether the factory had a troubled record.

It's not lost on me that the part of the White House we are destroying is the part that has to do with women's history in the White House.

She Made Sure That Tsunami Warnings Reached the Public

The @nytimes.com climate section is profiling federal scientists who have been terminated and their work.

I spoke with tsunami expert Corina Allen, who worked to ensure tsunami alerts made it to the public. She was fired in February.

Read her story and others':

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/c...

More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days. The government does not track how often immigration agents grab citizens. So ProPublica did. Our tally — almost certainly incomplete — includes people who were held for days without a lawyer. And near...

Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents.

They’ve had their necks kneeled on.

They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear.

At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them.

By @nicolefoy.bsky.social

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS: IU fires student media director after he refused to censor the IDS Indiana University directed the IDS to stop printing news.

What a strange, bizarre story.

The Media School @ Indiana Univeristy [Ernie Pyle, '23*] demands school newspaper print *no news* in homecoming edition of the paper. When media advisor balks ("This is First Amendment stuff”), he's fired?

*didn't graduate

www.idsnews.com/article/2025...

Support independent media, now more than ever. Not just news and politics, but film, TV, fashion and other cultural criticism and commentary, from podcasts to apps to good old-fashioned web sites. Pay for it. Turn your adblocker off so they can keep the lights on. Share it.

Omg. I would shut down my entire paper before resorting to this crap

The Price of Remission: This Cancer Drug Saves Lives — but Costs a Fortune. I Wanted to Know Why. When I was diagnosed with cancer, I set out to understand why a single pill of Revlimid cost the same as a new iPhone. I’ve covered high drug prices as a reporter for years. What I discovered shocked ...

Cancer drug Revlimid is one of the bestselling pharmaceutical products of all time, with total sales of over $100 billion.

It’s also extraordinarily expensive, costing nearly $1,000 for each pill, even though that pill costs just 25 cents to make.

(Published May 2025)

An apartment complex. A headline reads: "Did Switzerland Solve The Housing Crisis?"

The way that housing co-ops work in Switzerland may seem foreign to many. But the central idea is simple: What if homeownership had no profit motive and no capital gains? Advocates say their model could reshape how the world thinks about affordable housing. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/r...

UT Dallas Bans Newsstands, Another Blow to Freedoms at the School The school's new policy dramatically limits the presence of local media on campus, something that's been happening too often.

UT-Dallas reversed course this week and will allow four kiosks on campus to distribute the student paper. This after an op-ed by editor Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez, who wrote that UT-Dallas removed dozens in "another hostile step toward limiting the media available to its students." loom.ly/r8effko

If your local weekly paper costs $1 a week or $52 a year, this is how much you are paying per day for local news. Think about it.

Data centers consume massive amounts of water – companies rarely tell the public exactly how much In 2024, one data center in Iowa consumed 1 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the state’s residences with water for five days.

Data centers for AI and cloud computing don’t just use a lot of electricity – they also use enormous quantities of water as well, to cool down all those servers. buff.ly/KtLcLZ2

As Facebook Abandons Fact-Checking, It’s Also Offering Bonuses for Viral Content Meta decided to stop working with U.S. fact-checkers at the same time as it’s revamping a program to pay bonuses to creators with high engagement numbers, potentially pouring accelerant on the kind of...

ProPublica identified 95 Facebook pages that regularly post made-up headlines designed to draw engagement — and, often, stoke political divisions.

The pages, most of which are managed by people overseas, have a total of more than 7.7M followers.

(Published Feb.)

The book (great content, loathe the cover) will finally be available at an affordable price in a few weeks. $23. Pre-order here and ask your local library to get it.

www.routledge.com/Reviving-Rur...

About 76% of top-performing women encounter negative feedback compared to just 2% of men—and it’s making them want to quit “We tend to relate to women in the workplace based on how they make the people around them feel, rather than the work that they're doing.”

Around 76% of high-performing women receive negative feedback compared to only 2% of men
fortune.com/2024/08/08/m...

Smithsonian removes Trump from impeachment exhibit in American History Museum A temporary placard, on display since 2021, described the president's historic impeachments. Officials said the exhibit was restored to an earlier version following a review of legacy content.

Under pressure from the White House, the Smithsonian censored an exhibit that mentioned Trump’s impeachments, now inaccurately suggesting to visitors that he was never impeached at all (let alone twice). www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...

Analysis | The Fact Checker rose in an era of false claims. Falsehoods are now winning. Longtime Fact Checker Glenn Kessler takes stock as he departs The Washington Post.

“In an era where false claims are the norm, it’s much easier to ignore the fact-checkers.”
— a poignant final line from a retiring critical journalist. Gift link. Worth your time. Thank you for your service @glennkessler.bsky.social

wapo.st/41kFq2G

Trump Administration Freezes $108 Million in Funds to Duke University The university was accused of racial discrimination in its health care system, the latest high-profile school targeted and stripped of federal funding.

The Trump administration has frozen $108 million in federal funds for Duke University’s medical school and health care system, according to two administration officials.

For women, the increase of AI use in the workplace may affect their careers: Harvard study Women are using AI significantly less then men and it’s going to have a major impact on their careers, according to extensive research on the topic.

Every. Single. Story. about women not using AI as much as men portray it as bad for their future career prospects (without a shred of evidence) and a result of women being fearful little ladies rather than looking at AI's output and saying "this sucks, it's not going to help me."

I know it seems hard to believe, but once upon a time cable TV news wasn't six people sitting around a table arguing with each other for an hour.

It provided interesting and informative news reporting from around the country and the world.

Is your family member or client at Alligator Alcatraz? We obtained a list The Trump and DeSantis administrations have refused to release a roster of detainees, none of whom seem to appear in ICE’s online database.

The Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times has obtained a list of more than 700 people who have been detained or appear to be scheduled to be sent to the Florida-run immigration detention facility.

FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors, Documents Show

The floods ripped through Texas on July 4.

On July 5, FEMA received 3000 calls from survivors. 1% were unanswered.

That night, Trump/Noem fired the people who answer the calls.

On July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls. 65% unanswered.

July 7: 85%.

Sick.

New Substack! The forgotten history of Dorothy Thompson, who fearlessly stared down Hitler in person, in columns, and in the press after she was kicked out of Germany. Total badass.

(link below)

#history #DorothyThompson #journalism #Hitler #Nazis

Trump Wants to Cut Tribal College Funding by Nearly 90%, Putting Them at Risk of Closing ProPublica found that Congress was underfunding tribal colleges by a quarter-billion dollars per year. Rather than fixing the problem, proposed federal funding cuts unveiled this week would devastate…

Tribal college leaders said they were stunned by the proposed cuts to their already insufficient funding and had more questions than answers.

“It’s a dagger, and I don’t know how we can survive these types of cuts,” one college president said.

By @mattkrupnick.bsky.social

Death, Sexual Violence and Human Trafficking: Fallout From U.S. Aid Withdrawal Hits the World’s Most Fragile Locations Exclusive State Department records show: As the Trump administration abandons its humanitarian commitments, diplomats are reporting that the cuts have led to violence and instability while…

Refugees in Kenya have died at food distribution centers, officials noted, including a pregnant woman crushed to death during a stampede.

Aid workers said they expected more people to get hurt “as vulnerable households become increasingly desperate.”

Trump Administration Knew Vast Majority of Venezuelans Sent to Salvadoran Prison Had Not Been Convicted of U.S. Crimes Homeland Security records reveal that officials knew that more than half of the 238 deportees were labeled as having no criminal record in the U.S. and had only violated immigration laws.

We obtained lists of alleged gang members used by Venezuelan law enforcement and Interpol.

Those lists include some 1,400 names. None of the names of the 238 Venezuelan deportees matched those on the lists.

W/ @texastribune.org‬ @cazadoresdefakenews.info & Alianza Rebelde Investiga

Article excerpt: When police used stun batons to hit garment workers seeking a $14 monthly raise from a Nike factory in Cambodia in 2013, reportedly leading one pregnant woman to miscarry, Nike said it was “deeply concerned.” The following year, when Cambodian police opened fire and killed four garment workers during widespread demonstrations over low wages, Nike and other brands sent the government a letter expressing “grave concern.”

Despite repeatedly raising concerns about labor rights, Nike has grown its presence in Cambodia from about 16,000 factory workers in May 2013 to more than 57,000 as of March.

Read more: propub.li/4kIhjCC

The AI Boom Is Draining Water From the Areas That Need It Most A Bloomberg News analysis finds that roughly two thirds of new data centers built or in development in the US since 2022 are in places with high levels of water stress.

Each time you ask an AI chatbot a question, it sends a request to a data center and strains an increasingly scarce resource: water.

A 🧵on our investigation into how the data centers that power AI are increasingly being built in highly water-stressed places:

www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

Reading this 👇 Only 100 pages in, but highly recommend. What else should I read that touches on the intersection of journalism and mental health?

The Price of Remission When I was diagnosed with cancer, I set out to understand why a single pill of Revlimid cost the same as a new iPhone. I’ve covered high drug prices as a reporter for years. What I discovered shocked…

Cancer drug Revlimid is one of the bestselling pharmaceutical products of all time, with total sales of over $100 billion.

It’s also extraordinarily expensive, costing nearly $1,000 for each pill, even though that pill costs just 25 cents to make.

By @davidarmstrongx.bsky.social